We have introduced two new siege units since the last playtest, the Ram and the Ballista.
The battering ram - siege weapon (new)
Building required: Siege Workshop
It is a nightmare for any static defence. Thanks to their excellent armour, they can break through enemy lines and flatten buildings in no time. The armour and their rolling speed can improve with proper research. Their unique ability is to explode and inflict massive damage when they are about to fall apart.
The Ballista - siege weapon (new)
Building required: Siege Workshop
The Ballista is an effective siege weapon that proves its strength, especially in big battles. Its projectiles penetrate almost any armour and can only be stopped by buildings or large units. Their armour is weak but can be improved through research, as can their range and rolling speed. Its unique ability is a triple fan shot with a relatively short cooldown.
For people who haven't played yet the demo/playtest, there is also a catapult available:
The Catapult - siege weapon
Building required: Siege Workshop
Catapults are powerful siege weapons with high destructive potential but little endurance. Once without cover from melee units, they quickly become worthless. Their shields, range and roll speed are upgradeable to make them even more dangerous. As a unique ability, they can also throw specific magic bombs, depending on the caster's magic school.
Each unit has a physical condition which influences what kind of spells/buffs/damage affects them. Standard healing spells will not fix Siege Units. Instead, they get repaired by workers either at the base or in formations. There is more detail about this in the upcoming worker section of this post.
Besides the special skill for each unit (included in the description already), there are three levels of upgrades available for rolling speed and projectile range.
When your focus of a mission is siege warfare, Arcane magic might be a good choice in some situations, as it has some spells and research options which enhance siege units.
Other magic schools might offer some good spells/research in the future to make choices more interesting.
The Workers AI has improved a lot over the last several months. They had several issues with how they were distributed to resources, building and repair tasks. They also could only handle one storage at each base,
Workers can now handle several storages and will now always use the closest available storage. If there is no storage, they are using the Wizard Tower. If there is no storage or Wizard Tower at the base, they don't mine any resources.
Workers sometimes leave their mining job to build and repair buildings. When this happened, resource balance settings got ignored. Hence, the player set 50% on gold and 50% on mana and two workers from the gold resource would leave to work on buildings. The workers on the mana resource would not split up to also mine gold. Now it works as intended.
It is now possible to not only configure the resource balance and how many workers should repair/build a building but also how many workers on the base should repair/build.
Workers can now repair siege units at the base. The siege units can be in tents, on guard duty or defending the base. They will always get repaired if enough workers are available.
Workers do now repair siege units in formations. When you send siege units into a fight to conquer a foreign base don't forget to add some workers to your army to ensure your siege weapons don't get destroyed that easily.
The pick-axe effect got overhauled, and workers now drop visible mana and gold ingots in front of the storage.
Thanks for reading!
Our way to Kickstarter - Part 1
Yeah, I guess that was a long time of silence. There are reasons for this, but I don't want to bother you with boring real-life details.
Fortunately, there has been a lot of progress made on "Heart Of Muriet". We will introduce it in steps over the next few weeks until our Kickstarter launches. It will go live on the 27th of August. A new demo will be available at this date as well.
Today we are going to talk about the new...
In the demo, you could research about ten different spells, but it did not feel like you were choosing between different paths for your wizard. To make this more interesting, we added magic schools to the game.
We implemented the following four magic schools:
Arcane
Defend your siege weapons with buffs and cast potent arcane missiles
Nature
Heal your injured troops, protect your forest, and poison enemies with powerful nature spells.
Fire
Debuff and hurt your enemies with fierce fireballs and protect your buildings with burning walls.
Water
Cleanse debuffs from allied units, freeze enemy armies and wipe them out with mighty blizzards.
Each school has four levels the wizard can learn during a mission. There are no restrictions on researching multiple schools as long as enough resources and time are available. Though you probably have to make some informed choices as your opponent might try to counter your mastered spells.
The magic schools are also a gating mechanism, comparable to the Ages in "Age of Empires". The higher your magic school, the more research, buildings, and spells are unlocked. You can use some research options only when mastering certain magic school levels.
Let's look into the details of the Nature magic school.
That is a picture of the newly implemented research tree, which shows all the different options available in the laboratory. Check out the spell tooltip screenshots to get an idea of spells obtainable for the Nature magic school.
Another new feature you might have already spotted is upgrading spells. Most have more than one level available. All spell levels will occupy the same UI slot, and you can cycle through them by clicking on the corresponding spell button as soon as you have researched them.
If the overall concept works out, more schools might follow in the future.
The new research tree fixes the problem of understanding the structure of the game progression. You can now check which building to build to unlock a research option or which magic school level you need for a specific spell. It will also give the player a better understanding of which content is currently in the game.
That's it for today. Thanks for reading.
Heart of Muriet Developer Livestream
Hi Seeners,
I've been pretty quiet over the past few months as I've been hard at work on Heart of Muriet. I'm excited to share the new build with you, in both demo and video form. A demo will be available during the Steam Next Fest (21st - 27th February), as well as a deep dive into the new game mechanics through a developer live stream with Lewis.
I can't wait for you all to see how much the game has progressed.
Thank you for your support,
Microtale
Heart of Muriet Developer Livestream
Hi Seeners,
I've been pretty quiet over the past few months as I've been hard at work on Heart of Muriet. I'm excited to share the new build with you, in both demo and video form. A demo will be available during the Steam Next Fest (21st - 27th February), as well as a deep dive into the new game mechanics through a developer live stream with Lewis.
I can't wait for you all to see how much the game has progressed.
